You Drift, You Keep Drifting, and Then You’re Gone
Late at night with something to drink, scrolling through Facebook looking for old friends—that familiar ritual of mild voyeurism that almost always ends in something worse. You want to see who got married, who got fat, whether the person who mattered to you at twenty-two has ended up somewhere recognizable. What you find instead is the wreckage. Someone you used to know, buried in a feed of xenophobic posts, fabricated stories, images of threat designed to stoke fear in people already afraid of the wrong things.
Hamburg hip-hop group Fettes Brot—a trio who’ve been making smart, socially sharp music since the early nineties—wrote a song about watching this happen to someone you loved. Du driftest nach rechts, "You’re Drifting Right," is structured as a breakup ballad, which is the correct framing. It is a breakup. The person is still technically present, but the shared values, the recognizable interior life, the version of them that meant something to you—those are gone.
What the song understands is that the radicalization itself isn’t really the story. The story is the precondition: loneliness, susceptibility to simple explanations, the appeal of having enemies. The rightward drift is a symptom of something that was already happening, and the person experiencing it often doesn’t know it’s occurring at all. The song’s title is second person, an address—and that’s the cruelest part. You can see it from the outside. They can’t.
Fettes Brot are better at restraint than most, and here they’re uncharacteristically direct. The production holds the tension well—an indie-disco pulse under something that wants to cry. Their album Lovestory contains it, a title that reads as irony and as sincerity simultaneously and earns both readings.
The people this song is addressed to won’t recognize themselves in it. That’s the condition. But for everyone watching someone they cared about disappear into that particular fog—and most of us have watched someone by now—it’s something close to a document. Evidence that it happened, and that you’re not the only one it happened to.